The Satellite Dish in My Mansion Has Many Stations

"Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures," writes Schuon.

Now, "prerogative" is not a word found or even conceptualizable in science. Animals don't have them, let alone planets, forces, quantities, etc. 

From a purely scientific standpoint a prerogative would have to be just a social arrangement, purely contingent upon more real things (post-rogatives?). Nevertheless.

PREROGATIVE: preference, privilege; a right attached to an office or rank to exercise a special privilege or function; a special right or privilege belonging to a person, group, or class of individuals; a special quality that gives one superiority.

The bottom line is that mother was right: I am special.

Pretty perceptive of her to recognize that you're a person. How long did it take?

I see your point. The specialness attaches to the species, or better, to persons. And an office or rank only exist in a hierarchy. 

And you're only at the top of the terrestrial hierarchy. Above that are nonlocal vertical powers, principalities, and immaterial beings with privileges of their own. 

For example it is my awesome privilege to advise and protect you -- mostly from yourself. At least until such a time that I earn my wings and get kicked upstairs. 

Right. The Petey Principle. 

Very funny. But it doesn't work like that. Within terrestrial hierarchies, it is true that people tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence.

And much higher if Brandon and K-Har are any indication. 

In the angelic hierarchy it's different. Here an angel descends to the level of his own malice. Thus, if Joe Biden were an angel he'd already be in hell. 

No doubt with the rest of the Biden clan. 

Yes, there's always plenty of company. Up here we have a saying: truly truly, depravity loves company. It's why they keep adding letters to LGBTQ ad nauseam.

I'm a little surprised they have a Democrat party up there. 

Down there. It can only recognized from above. From within the party it looks like it's "above."

I get it. That would explain the obnoxious superiority and condescension of the left -- the nauseating spectacle of being ruled by our intellectual and moral inferiors.

That's a bingo.   

A corrupt and stupid man who showers with his daughter and raises an utterly depraved crackhead son lecturing us about the "soul of the nation." 

There's no nausea up here, otherwise we'd never stop throwing up.

Eternal nausea -- like The View on an endless loop.

You're talking about hell. The Buddhists say it is populated by beings with ravenous hunger but pinhole mouths. But it's also a place of unending nausea with no ability to vomit. 

That happened to me in February of 2005. I remember it because it was a couple months before my son was born. I was nauseous all day from food poisoning, but suppressed the urge to throw up. Eventually I did and felt much better. I now have a 17 year streak with no vomiting.

Up here we have another saying, Too much information. Think about it.   

Oh c'mon. Where were you when someone should have warned me about the Kung Pao chicken?

Let's get back on track: intelligence, will, and sentiment, and all the interesting relationships between them. For starters we could express it schematically with the following:

Intelligence <---> Knowledge and Truth

Will <---> Freedom and Virtue

Sentiment <---> Love and Beauty

This seems to cover all the important privileges, as well as the corresponding (and anterior) responsibilities. 

For example, if we have the right to knowledge -- to think -- we have the responsibility to know truth; if we have freedom to act, it is in order to choose the good (and avoid the evil); if we have the right to creativity, we have a responsibility to beauty.  

Another way of looking at it is to say that each of our privileges has a telos. Which makes sense, because the whole hierarchy in which we are situated has its telos in the Absolute Principle-Person.

You know the new saying: facts don't care about your feelings. Actually, they do. Very much so. 

We are not advocating for a Spock-like detachment, if only because so much of reality is only accessible to emotion and sentiment, or better, to "sensibility." Progressives have only their crude and unformed oceanic feelings. We have sensibility. Taste. Discretion. Good breeding, as mother used to say.

Like last night, my son was channel surfing and landed on a hellish spectacle called the I Heart Music Awards or something. For a sensitive soul like me who truly hearts music, it was vulgar beyond belief. A soundtrack to hell, or worse, to The View. 

Now that I think about it, it caused a kind of very real pain, a pain that I suppose has no name, but is nevertheless distinct and familiar. 

The young siegneur then flipped over to another program where the host was speaking with such truth and lucidity that it provoked the "opposite" sensation of intense "pleasure," but that's not the right adjective. You know what I'm talking about. If there's existential nausea, there's also existential something-or-other.

For example, the tone of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar is at once impossible to describe and yet pretty obvious to these ears, especially in contrast to, say, Lennie Kravitz's tone, which nearly drove me from the room. I was about to get up and leave before my son flipped over to the other channel.

My house has many channels.

Damn. Every once in a while you do say something useful. But you should have said it at the start, because that's the subject of a whole post that will have to be written tomorrow.